


Seal My Eyes; Hold Down My Tongue

by odoridango



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Curtain Fic, Handholding, M/M, Melancholy, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Queerplatonic Shiro & Keith, because its zombies by necessity its also an epidemic fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 09:08:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27468502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odoridango/pseuds/odoridango
Summary: Shiro, Keith, and one day spent in a house on a hill, cleaning up after themselves.A Zombie AU with a tiny dash of CottagecoreLite™.
Relationships: Keith & Shiro (Voltron), Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 18





	Seal My Eyes; Hold Down My Tongue

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Fall for Sheith with driveby mentions of all prompts. Given the times, here's also some forewarnings so you know what you're getting into! 
> 
> The epidemic in this fic is not at all based on COVID, but you may find mentions of familiar things like masks, ventilators, etc. The Walking Dead, this fic really is not. There is a good bit of gore and maybe body horror, and given nature of the genre, glancing mentions to topics such as medical ethics, euthanasia, suicide, and internment.

👋

 _Still alive_ , Shiro types back.

Softly, softly, he creeps down the stairs. By habit, he sticks to the sides of the steps where the wood is nailed down and sturdy, close to the rails for a sightline to the front door. Step heel first, weight carefully balanced in his core, before rolling forward to the ball of the foot. Go slowly. In the living room, dull light leaks around the sides of pulled fabric curtains, thick and weighted enough to become blackout shades. Weak morning sun draws two pale, parallel lines over a heavy wooden coffee table, a worn sofa and armchair. Two muddy, messy sets of rushed footprints, long dried, congeal formerly plush, long loops of aged carpet.

Day two in the house. Upstairs, Keith is still asleep, reacquainting himself with the concept of a spring mattress. It’s strange to be standing in a house again. Correction: it’s strange to be standing in a house, _safely_. No blood, no bodies. Papers are scattered over the counters and tables. The keepsakes left on the shelves are knocked over, standing askew, rolled off their stands. Clean dishes wait to be stowed away in a sinkside rack. But it’s nothing compared to the frenzy they’d found in other apartments, houses, offices, convenience stores – no broken glass or ceramic, no spills, no stains, no fetid smell of fresh rot or discharged bowels. Nothing had reached for them from the dark when they’d barged in hastily two nights before. No jump scares, no closet surprises. A quick sweep of the second floor had only revealed the cheerful blinking of an internet router and the sleepy red wink of the fire alarm.

Water from the kitchen sink runs cold and clear. Splashing it on his face doesn’t make him any more or less awake; he usually gets the back half of the night watch anyway. He stares at the lines of light glowing wanly over the carpet, waiting for the shadow of movement. Beads of frigid water slip down his neck, soak into the ribbed collar of the black crew shirt he’d taken from the last drugstore they’d raided. He stares and stares, watches to see if that light brightens or bends. Nothing happens.

Lifting the edge of the curtain, he peeks outside. The window is completely smeared with streaks of coagulated blood and rot, small, drying flecks of half-rotted skin studding hand-shaped drag trails like old leather, and unidentifiable lumps of tissue dripping down, dragged by gravity, adhered by the artifacts of their own putrefaction. Similar biological detritus is strewn all over the porch, painted in swathes of rusty brown, dotted here and there with little gifts. A glistening strip of muscle, a finger, a bumpy partially-necrotic lump that looks like it could be a pancreas, confetti in the form of torn scraps of flesh. Everywhere they go is a toddler’s fingerpainting masterpiece, all primary colors mixed and mashed together to make brown sludge, impasto included. What a biohazard.

Oh, but there are a couple red and orange leaves too. They look like fire. Pretty. Bright, a contrast to the mist shrouding the hill and surrounding forest, the same dense fog that had corralled him and Keith toward the house in the first place. The serene, opaque, watercolor sky of grays diffuses any sunlight, indifferent and uninterested in how withholding sun might affect the creatures that live on earth. And why _would_ the sky or clouds or sun care? Why would the earth care? Spiteful anthropomorphizing does nothing. The weather, the ground, the planetary movements cannot and do not care about life on earth. They merely respond to their conditions. Respond to the actions of people and their influence on the environment. Reflect. A system does not actually do anything with intention. The intention is projected, the same way Shiro feels the sky has cheated him. So there’s nothing to feel cheated about. It’s just Shiro, and the ego of the modern mind.

He stares past the porch, to the grounds, waits again for a sign of movement, or a change in the light. Nothing happens. That’s a good thing. But better to wait for Keith to wake, to make sure.

Settling on the tiled kitchen floor, he digs out a pack of saltines from his bag, eats them while he plugs his phone into one of the wall outlets to charge. Sighing, Shiro opens his email.

Even in the middle of an epidemic, marketing emails prevail. The perils of automation, the same mechanism that’s ensured that the water, lights, and sometimes gas stay on in the few houses they’ve squatted in. Apartments are too risky. Internet’s more of a toss-up, but there’d been a post-it with the password stuck onto the router and Shiro’s got hopes for the speed. Not like he and Keith will be grinding any multiplayer dungeon missions while they’re here. At this point, that’s just like real life. No escapism in that. And they’ve got other things to take care of first.

_Hi Shiro – regarding your questions about additional PTO, you’ve maxed out your annual allowance. If you need more time off, you’ll either have to file for unpaid time off and get it approved, or apply for leave. But if you’re on good enough terms with Iverson, you might be able to work something out with him one-on-one. That may be your best option. I don’t think this is a situation anyone ever anticipated, and we’re working on responding more flexibly, in an official capacity. In the meantime, there seems to be an unofficial rule to handle things on a case-by-case basis, and your case is, by far, the most extreme. If it helps, I haven’t told anyone else, since you haven’t formally changed your status yet. Let me know what you decide. Hope you stay safe out there. All the best._

_Regards,_

_Ryan Kinkade  
HR Generalist  
Garrison Consultants  
Only the Universe’s Best!  
  
_

Shiro frowns, scratching at the overgrown shag of his hair. Not anything he didn’t expect, just frustrating, and as usual, he’s tempted to dump his mountain of documentation on the Garrison’s doorstep as a shock tactic to prove his outstanding circumstances. He’s grateful that he can work away from an office at all, but shitty solar-cell batteries are nothing compared to grounded electrical cables. At this point, both he and Keith know there’s no outrunning the spores or the afflicted. The wave of infection is following them out from the center of the country, blowing with the wind towards the coasts and hitting every city and town in between.

This is a nice house. Well kept. The baseboards look like they were recently repainted, the crown molding is a little dusty, but there aren’t any cobwebs. The countertops are some kind of solid quartz surfacing, not cheap, flaking laminate. There’s a fancy automatic espresso machine on the counter. Coffee, now there’s a familiar and dear idea. Shiro can’t remember what the outside of the house looks like, hadn’t paid much attention because he’d been more interested in not getting munched at the time, but he can’t remember seeing any peeling paint or molding wood, or tripping over awry nails. This could be an opportunity.

Several push notifications shove their way to the top of the screen.

_We’re starting to see more cases here in the hospitals, mostly person-to-person transmission. Beef imports are being halted again too, as if that’s a surprise. Probably going to switch to Australia. There’s a lot of anxiety. Dad’s really worried about you._

_Hey Shiro. Hope you and Keith are still okay. Here’s the dispersion data that we aggregated yesterday. Glad you’re out of the central states, the news we’ve been getting has been bonkers. We’re all pretty scared. But keep sending what you can. We’re archiving and uploading everything you send us._

He stares at the miniscule, ten-point font until the black pixels fragment and blur, splitting into twos, threes, fives. His fingers clutch around the shock-absorbing case, white knuckled.

“There _is_ always beef with the beef,” he murmurs into the voice assistant, acutely feels the drag of vocalization against his throat, the friction, the need for watering, trying not to feel like he’s only making excuses, trying to remember what it felt like to comfort Ryou. “We’re doing our best. Be careful; tell Dad I said hey, and that I love him. Love you too. Good luck.”

“Thanks for the map, it will be helpful,” he says to Matt, more soothing platitudes. “Based on our experience, the data’s still lagging behind by a week, and the afflicted have more erratic behavior patterns than you think. They’ll go after larger animals too, there’s not a preference for humans. We’re squatting in a house now. I’ll see if we can upload a package for you.”

Hunting for spelling errors, he pecks them out of existence. Smooths over this parallel life, makes it a bit more palatable, despite the gore and macabre images he’ll try to send to Matt later. Just talking to HR. Just texting family and friends. There is chaos, there is confusion, there is anxiety and uncertainty, hysteria in some corners. But Shiro and Keith are too busy running across the country to catch up on all the bullhorn tweets, the lengthy thinkpieces, the sentimental nightly news appeals. If they have enough power, they’ll check-in, scour Twitter, magazines and websites for the latest news, determined and hoping for anything that might help them. If they don’t, then oh well. The world does not end; there is no apocalypse. Just the sensation of one.

_Shiro,_

_There are days where I think of you and Keith and fear greatly for you both. It is so strange to be attending classes and doing schoolwork when I know that half a world away, you’re both fighting for your lives. It was only about two months ago that we all received that first message from you, and how quickly the world has changed in that time. The infection rate here in England keeps rising. There is a denialism here, I think, of what this means for society. What this sickness looks like, or how it feels when people wake up and are not themselves. It’s an emotional, not rational, question, a very complicated ethical quandary. There’ve been stories of people collapsing at home, at their desks at work. Air purifier sales have gone up, though I don’t know that those filters would do anything. The afflicted wander the countryside, and sometimes in the cities too, if the signs are caught too late. Sometimes they are killed by their own family members, sometimes gunned down by livestock farmers. Sometimes the police are sent after them, especially in the city, though they seem reluctant to engage. Bad optics, I suppose, though I don’t see why that should concern them more than the optics of their usual barbaric, brutal tactics._

_Getting news from the States is a jarring experience. I get your emails and the packages you send Matt, then I get nervous memes from Lance, and recipe links from Hunk. Agriculture and husbandry are cratering in the markets, and imports of meat and produce are halting the world over. There are doomsayers and conspiracy theorists saying it’s all a scare tactic so the government can take over, all while undocumented farmworkers, meatpackers, health workers, and the people of the central states bear the brunt of this. Especially early on in areas like where you were, what with the lack of widespread medical facilities. I see posts of gorgeous fall foliage right along videos and pictures just like the ones you’ve taken. At least the health apparatus is producing guidance and advisories and putting money into research and treatment, but it seems like the rest of the country is either bracing itself or still playing oblivious, with no understanding that the spores and the afflicted are already here. I hesitate to think of what my reaction might’ve been, if I were still in the States. Hopefully as the seasons turn colder, we’ll be granted some reprieve._

_However useless this may be to say, I’ll still say it: I hope you and Keith stay safe, Shiro. I want to see you both again._

_All my love,  
Allura_

He reads Allura’s email again, biting his lip. He’s always careful about how he responds. Never says that he and Keith are okay, never tells anyone that they’re right to be scared and worried. There’s nothing he can say or do to make it better, or to console them. Just the same, no one offers to let him and Keith crash with them, no one rolls up their sleeves and races to their car to come get them and make sure they’re safe. There is no getting the band back together, no tearful reunion, because without saying it, they all understand – the world runs on two timelines now, before the afflicted, and after the afflicted, and at any moment, they could all teeter helplessly into the after, where Shiro and Keith already are, the two of them a makeshift time-traveling omen, a forewarning. He can’t blame anyone for not wanting to invite affliction into their home. He and Keith will make it out on their own or not at all. With their stubbornness combined, Shiro’s more than willing to bet all his chips on them making it hell or high water, but in the end, the world is more than just him and Keith, just like it’s always been.

As Shiro goes over Allura’s email a third time, wondering how to respond, Keith edges down the stairs, noiseless and fleet-footed. A quarter of a fig bar sticks out of his mouth, wobbling as he chews, so he must feel some measure of safe. Clearing the area yesterday probably helped. There’s no guarantee that another wave of afflicted won’t find them, but the house is isolated, bounded by forests beginning to drop autumn leaves. That fact alone makes the house substantially safer than some of the apartment complexes, trailer parks, suburbs, and gated communities they’d raided before. They’ll sweep the grounds again today besides.

“Morning,” Keith says, fig bar in hand and still chewing. Sitting down next to Shiro, he scoots in for the hug they always give each other to mark the start of each new, precious day. 

“Morning, Keith,” Shiro sighs into Keith’s temple, wrapping an arm around his shoulders to cradle him close. “Just reading an email from Allura. Matt sent us a new data set, too, so I’ll try to send him another package today.”

Keith nods, shoving the rest of the bar into his mouth gracelessly. He grinds the side of his head into Shiro’s shoulder, his version of a nuzzle. “Good thing this place has a working router then. We gonna burn the remains today? Better take a closer look around this place while we’re at it.”

“We haven’t come across a place as put together as this for a while, huh?” Shiro says, rubs his thumb across Keith’s shoulder.

“Didn’t even have to break in since the owners left the door unlocked,” Keith says, pleased. “They must’ve been running scared.”

“What for?” Shiro grumbles, tipping his head back to meet the cabinets. “The spores haven’t made full landfall here yet.”

“Maybe they thought they could get away,” Keith says, smirk edged in bad humor. “Probably tried to head to Canada, or somewhere even colder.”

Shiro huffs, darkly amused. In the first few days, he and Keith had thought about that, too.

“Anyway, their loss, our gain,” Keith says and pokes Shiro’s knee. “I kind of just want to make sure we’re clear enough that I can check if the hot water around here works. Think about it, Takashi. A hot shower.”

Groaning, Shiro lets his head flop to the side, on top of Keith’s. The thought of it is luxurious after two months of sponge baths and very quick dips into freezing rivers. “Keith, you’re a genius.”

Keith laughs throatily. “Then shouldn’t you listen to me more, Takashi?”

“It’s not a value judgment,” Shiro says, rolling his eyes and standing, offering Keith a hand up.

“Then listen to me anyway,” Keith says, challenging, mischief unfurling across his face as he takes the hand.

“I do,” Shiro says, arching an eyebrow as he starts riffling through his pack. “I just sometimes decide not to care.” That’s a direct paraphrase from Keith, really, a well-loved phrase that Keith trots out whenever he goads Shiro to race somewhere they’re not supposed to, or does something reckless.

Keith snorts, checking the filters on his full-face respirator. Corpse cleanup isn’t something they do often, but it is sometimes necessary, and they don’t take any chances. They get on their kits, always prepared to run at a moment’s notice. Rubber gloves go on first, then out come the jumbo trash bags, one worn over the torso with holes ripped out for the head and arms, another cut apart to make coverings for the arms and legs, held together by tape and a prayer. It’s the best thing they’ve been able to come up with, given circumstances. Hazmat suits aren’t exactly easy to find in any old place. Last piece to go on is the respirator, arguably the most important part. The spores are spread through contact with the eyes, nose, and mouth, and given that most of the afflicted in the swarm had been in advanced stages of decomposition, it was perfectly plausible that some might be close to fruiting, and could be contagious. Weapons are cinched on last for easy access, Shiro with a bright red fireman’s axe, a lethal pick at the end, and Keith with his mother’s hunting knife and a sickle he’d nabbed from an abandoned barn during a swarm.

They leave using the backdoor, ostensibly to see if there’s a garden shed with tools they can use, but also because they just want to see the rest of the property. Two bikes are propped up in the hallway leading outside, right next to the open door that leads to a combination mud and workroom, equipped with cleaning supplies, a sink, a workbench, and plenty of mechanical and crafting tools, with its own dedicated exit to the backyard. They opt for the more straightforward way out, and when they swing open the second screen door, they’re greeted with a riot of overgrown greenery. Large, healthy kabocha and a variety of other squash sit fat on the vine, a couple apple and quince trees clustering all together toward the far end of the garden. Several sizeable vegetable beds spill over with eggplant, tomatoes, string beans, soybeans, bell peppers, kohlrabi, chard, and napa cabbage, accompanied by neatly sown rows bursting with the green tops of onions, leeks, and scallions, as well as a carb-loaded patch of potatoes, taro, and ube. Ripe lemons and kumquats force their shrub branches to droop, and Shiro makes a face at the persimmon tree full of coral-bright, teardrop-shaped fruit. He prefers their flatter, crisper cousins.

“You think these are safe to eat?” Keith asks doubtfully, squatting next to the herb patch set off to the side. With the respirator on, his voice is a muffled half-shout, the practiced tone they’ve had to use to make themselves heard. Though he can’t smell the herbs to identify them, he rubs his fingers against some of the leaves by habit, thoughtful.

“I feel like it would be such a waste not to. There’s so much here,” Shiro says in awe, squishing the rounded bottom of a deeply purple, skinny eggplant. “You don’t see any signs of an afflicted corpse around, do you? Aside from the ones we made, I mean.”

Keith rustles through a few more tilled patches, studies the loose enclosure around the garden, fine wire mesh netting strung around sturdy wooden posts and staked to the ground. There is a large shed in one corner, clearly handbuilt from mismatched fragments of wood and whitewashed unevenly. The mesh netting wraps around the shed walls and incorporates the structure in the garden borders. Several feet away, lush grass gives way to a thorny thicket of bushes, dark, plump berries gleaming dully, before opening to the forest beyond. “Nope. But if the spores have already been blown around, wouldn’t they taint the vegetables anyway?”

“I guess?” Shiro prods morosely at the grandiose fan of a cabbage leaf. “But I don’t think spores bind to plants. I’ve only ever heard of them infecting animals. The prions bind to plants for sure, and the spores bind to the prions. So the soil would either have to already be contaminated with prions, fungal isoform or not, or a sick, afflicted animal would need to have died around here recently. I’m not seeing any extra bones or bodies so far.”

Keith picks an apple from a low hanging branch, blowing air out through his lips. “I still can’t believe that this whole thing started with contaminated plants,” he says, turning the fruit around, examining the skin. “It’s probably not what anyone expected.”

“Reality’s definitely stranger than fiction right now,” Shiro says quietly. Layers of thick cotton in his head, between the infection they’ve read about at night, when they have the battery power and safety to do so, and the afflicted that stumble toward him and Keith in forests and on asphalt. Sometimes the afflicted aren’t that far along, paper-thin skin stretched over protruding bone and bulging rounds of organs, dragging broken limbs behind them, eyes rotted out of their skulls. The eyes always the first to go, too soft and vulnerable, open to the air and easy for birds to pick at. Sometimes, the afflicted are close to stopping, finally dying, stalks of fruiting bodies beginning to protrude from the wet, messy softness of entrails and muscles that drip and slough off with every staggering, jolting step. Layers of thick cotton, heavy and sopping from soaking up the terrified drippings between cold, distant text and watching Louise Beauchamp, resident of room 203, down the hall from the imaging lab he’d frequented, show ever more severe signs of daytime drowsiness.

Back then, Shiro would have never imagined that a fungus and prion team-up was to blame. Suspected dementia with Lewy bodies meant that some chronic sleepiness was not unusual for Louise, but she’d never drifted off in mid-conversation with him before or drowsed into a nap during regular check-ups, never mind ending up face down in front of her Connect Four opponent during game night. The quickly increasing frequency of her unexpected naps had been a blinking neon sign to her doctors that something was very wrong, and when she’d fallen asleep one day and hadn’t woken back up, the nurses had carried her gently back to her room with their grim mouths pursed and eyes crinkled in worry and resignation. Bedridden, her body functions had continued to drop, and her MRI scans had showed unusually rapid brain degeneration in just a few days’ span. Even more concerning was the fact that many patients had begun to exhibit the same pattern, drowsing into a constant unconscious state and undergoing massive neurodegeneration. Frantically calling local hospitals and research foundations to alert them and ask for advice, the doctors and nurses had heard the same story over and over. A nameless disease was swamping the few rural hospitals and clinics. Patients fell into unconsciousness as they were being rushed to emergency wards, and ended up filling every spare bed and ventilator. Emergency lines were ringing off the hook with panicked reports from families, telling similar stories of drowsy family members drifting off for a nap, then staying that way.

Food contamination had been the early diagnosis, mad cow, unusually accelerated. But even after the authorities had tracked down the meat supplier responsible and issued a contamination warning, the cases reported had kept increasing. The medical community had already been exchanging horror stories about the afflicted in a flurry of distraught calls and messages, passing news about the jerking bodies roaming the countryside, sleepwalking. Biting others. It had been too fantastical to believe, but that hadn’t stopped palpable fear from stalking the halls as radiology technicians had come and gone, as specialists had debated about the cells they’d seen aggregating in certain parts of the body and had puzzled over blood panels. As the days had passed, doctors and physicians had begun to drop like flies, the remnants of the center’s staff running themselves ragged on their rounds. A call had gone out to volunteer professionals, a flood of them driving in to help from out of state. There had been something more to the disease, something missing, but only time and faster lab panels could help the doctors find out. The day the local news had announced that the contamination had been traced back to the soil of entire fields, and that the infection had been found to also involve some sort of symbiotic fungal agent, Louise began seizing in her sickbed. 

Unlike many of the patients who had lived in the neurology treatment center and retreat full time, Shiro had come and gone freely. Splitting time between the center and the prosthesis unit that had partnered with it, he’d been lodged off site at a small, homely motel. With his arm being a highly experimental unit, it had only made sense that enterprising post-docs and graduate students wanted to get a thoroughly documented paper out of it. Most of his time at the center had been spent around the imaging lab that worked with the prosthesis unit, but he’d frequently spoken with the other nurses, and had made a fixture of himself in the rec hall as he waited for the lab to call him back in for testing. Louise was a straightforward woman who’d reminded him of Keith at times, possessed of a cutting brand of sarcasm she wielded with precision, when she wasn’t battling through spells of confusion or drowsiness. He’d spent whole afternoons with her, both of them idling away time as they’d waited for the doctors to call them in. She’d asked her sister to send her to the program at the center, where she’d spent the last four months participating in a study. Perhaps one day, she’d said, her condition would be of help to someone else. She had seemed to appreciate his presence even when she was hallucinating, told him once that when he was there, she could at least tell that _he_ was someone real. Seizures, however, were not typical of her dementia symptoms, and she’d been intubated besides. He’d hit the emergency button with a vengeance and turned, intending to run for the nearest nurse on duty.

Instead, her hand had clamped around his forearm like a viper, and she’d craned her head toward him, teeth gnashing agitatedly around the plastic stretching down her throat, whites showing all around the edge of her eyes. She’d tried to drag him closer with a strength she’d never had, seeing but not recognizing. The IV drip had torn out of her arm and she bled sluggishly, but she didn’t show any signs of pain, just kept snapping her teeth, searching. Sallow and pale, the darkened trails of her blood vessels stood out starkly beneath her skin. He’d shouted for help, his single arm barred across her shoulders to hold her off, but there’d been cacophony brewing in the hallway, alarmed shouts splitting the air, followed by the rattle of creaking bed frames, the hissing noise of dragging lines, the crash and metallic clangs of a falling equipment cart, a frightened scream.

Afraid of hurting Louise, he’d pushed her back onto the bed with some force, scrambling away. She hadn’t made any noise, hadn’t grunted in pain or snarled, had only whipped her head from side to side silently and angrily like she wanted the tube out her trachea but didn’t remember how to use her hands to do it. The minute he’d moved, she’d lunged off the bed at him, knocking over the stool where he’d been sitting, hands clawed and reaching, only to be yanked back by the line of the life support machine that had still been lodged down her throat. It should have been extremely painful and damaging, but she’d kept pulling against the machine until it had fallen against the bed rails, blood flecking up the transparent tubing, bubbling, staining the tape still flapping from the corners of her mouth.

“Stop that, you’re hurting yourself, Louise,” he’d said automatically, voice shaking, but he’d been backing up, stumbling into the doorframe, struck by animal fear. All he’d been able to hear was the gurgling suck of the machine that had been keeping her alive, helping her breathe, the machine she was now struggling against, dead weight. Her eyes had been fixed avidly on him, and she’d lunged again, all of it silent save for the hiss and release of oxygen, the slick sounds of her tongue lashing and wagging like she could summon her gag reflex hard enough to push the tube out, all bile and bad things. Her teeth had ground down around plastic, and she’d eyed his throat like she wished it was his jugular vein she was chewing on, like she wanted to pin him down and rip him open. It had felt like horrific pantomime, a silent picture show he’d never bought a ticket to, and he’d groped blindly for the wall, needing something stable.

With shaking fingers, he’d turned his camera on. Fixed its eye on Louise, the way she’d been staring at him, the way blood had streamed down her chin, the way she’d struggled with enough force that the machine had begun to beep, the tube loosening from its moorings. He couldn’t calm her down, didn’t know how to withdraw the tracheal catheter. He would’ve been tempted to ask where the nurse was if he hadn’t already heard the increasing shouts and screams, hadn’t already thought about the many other patients who’d exhibited symptoms just like this.

“Sorry, Louise,” he had said, eyes burning. Tucking the phone into the chest pocket of his tee, he’d turned around the doorframe into chaos. Instruments and equipment had been strewn all over the floor, carts flipped on their sides, and nurses and doctors were struggling against the patients that were trying to grab hold of them, jaws stretched, tongues reaching. Like Louise, tubes had trailed after some patients like vestigial umbilical cords, while the open mouths of others had revealed savaged throats, raw and bloody. Just a few feet away was a dead body, Shiro had realized, a resident who’d driven in three days ago from South Dakota, with a penchant for brightly patterned scrubs. He’d checked on Louise just yesterday on his rounds. Propped haphazardly up against a wall, pinned there by four patients still brooding over his body, the resident’s throat had been torn open, gaping and red, fleshy tubes of his esophagus and blood vessels bared to the light, glistening and rubbery. The bite was uneven, likely the combined effort of at least two patients. Blood had soaked all into the front of his scrubs, which had borne a fun white and blue houndstooth pattern that day, had splattered all up the bottom half of his surgical mask. His expression was frozen in fear and surprise, eyebrows arched upwards, beseeching.

The patients hadn’t been eating him. Instead, they’d been leaving meticulous bites on his body, piercing through already dead flesh with their teeth, shaking their heads to make sure of their grip, before moving to a new spot to clamp down again. A single step from Shiro had them turning to him instantly, lurching upright, and a quick glance behind him had revealed three more patients shuffling his way, plastic tubes clinking off the tile floor, errant children off the leash, movements jerky and uncoordinated. Their heads had lolled limply, though their stares were unwavering, fixed on him like Louise had been.

“Run, Shiro!” one of the doctors down the hall had shouted, as she’d shoved a patient back into a growing clump of wanderers with no remorse. The whole group of them had fallen down like bowling pins while other patients turned their heads as one in the direction of her voice, honing in, staggering toward her. “We’ve sealed off the ward, but the back door is still open! Leave! You can’t reason with them! _They_ can’t reason with themselves! They’re not in there anymore!”

Shiro had wanted to argue, had wanted to be righteous and offended and ask how a doctor could give up on her patients so easily, but wouldn’t she know best? Hadn’t he witnessed the whole descent himself, watched the halls empty as more and more patients succumbed to bedrest and ventilation, watched as overworked nurses scrambled about, their coworkers falling prey to the same unknown that could snare them at any time, squeezed into the few, precious hospital beds already nearing capacity in a yet underreported, growing public health threat? Hadn’t he also felt afraid, when he’d wandered the grocery shelves and stared unnerved at the produce, noticing the unevenly cut, freshly printed paper notes alerting shoppers that their neighborhood grocer was doing the best they could to provide safe, untainted fruits, vegetables, and meat? Hadn’t he called Keith just two nights ago to ask what he should do, if he thought Shiro should leave given the circumstances?

“…I’ve heard that we’ve got a couple cases here, too,” Keith had admitted hesitantly. “And those meatpacking plants were national distributors. That’s how everyone at the center got sick, right?” 

“Yeah, that’s what they think,” Shiro had replied, picking at his jeans, grateful for speakerphone. “Tainted meat supply. They’re having us wear masks in the center just in case, since they think the doctors and nurses may have gotten infected while intubating patients. Most of the administrators who bring lunch from home though, they seem fine. And the prosthesis unit’s already trying to get me out as soon as possible. They’re putting in extra hours and proposing to just set up basic mods this time. I think they like the idea of getting midstage feedback too. So if all that works out, they think I can leave next Wednesday.”

“Next Wednesday?” Keith had parroted, brightening, and Shiro had imagined the way his eyes would widen, the smile that might begin to spread across his face. “Does this mean I can add those extra days in Texas? I’ll probably rework our route anyway, in light of this.”

Chuckling, Shiro had said, “Sure thing, Keith. Whatever you want. So you think I should stick around?”

“I just want you safe, you know that,” Keith had said, in that sincere soft way of his. Shiro had heard a distant clicking sound over the line, probably Keith being annoying with the ink click pens he liked to buy in bulk. He claimed that they made his signature look neater, gliding more easily on paper. There’d been the whisper of a resigned sigh in Keith’s throat when he’d spoken next. “I won’t deny that I’m worried about you. About this. I know you’re surrounded by doctors and in a healthcare center of all places, but brain degeneration? Deep coma? And spreading among the doctors too, enough that people are coming in from out of state? I don’t even want to think about it. And I know you’re worried too, otherwise you wouldn’t even be talking to me about this right now. Aside from the messages you’ve sent me, there hasn’t been a lot of information out there about the outbreak, so it seems like it’s still being treated like a local issue. All the same, it sounds like it’s mostly food contamination, so maybe you can just eat instant ramen, junk food, and I don’t know, bread, for a week and it’ll be fine. Then there’s your arm to consider. Honestly, it’s your call, Takashi. There’s a lot of factors at play here. You originally planned things so that you’d have the new unit in time for the trip, right?”

“Yeah, I did,” Shiro had said, ruffling a hand through his hair, beginning to pace. “But I’d rather finally go on this trip with you than anything else. I wouldn’t give it up for anything.” Neither of them had brought up the prospect of cancelling the trip. Not after three years of periodic meetups and daily messaging.

“Oh,” Keith had said simply, syllable falling out of his mouth like it was still a surprise that Shiro wanted time with him. Another moment that had seemed tailor-made to make Shiro’s heart squeeze, that had reminded Shiro of how much he adored Keith, the way he could be so tender. “Thanks. I want to spend time with you too.”

Shiro had closed his eyes then, let that simple statement sink in his chest and warm him. Going on the trip without the arm would have been perfectly doable, it wasn’t like Keith hadn’t seen him without a prosthesis before. When they’d first begun to room together, he hadn’t even had one yet. But if he went back to work without articulated fingers, his typing, and therefore, his productivity, would take the hit. “You’re right, Keith. I am pretty worried. But if I delay this, or go back to work without the arm, I might have more trouble down the line. I’ll talk to the center staff and prosthesis unit again tomorrow to get their honest opinion on things, and make a decision after that. I’ll let you know if I find out anything important, since you’re not getting much news back there. I’ll text you?”

“Like I’d ever hate hearing from you,” Keith had said, teasing. “Yeah, keep me posted, stay safe. I’ll see you soon?”

“Of course, Keith,” Shiro had replied as warmly as he could. “See you soon.”

The next afternoon, Shiro had visited Louise and asked the resident from South Dakota for his opinion, once he’d finished updating her chart.

“To be frank, it’s an actively developing situation,” he’d said, voice slightly muffled from the blue surgical mask covering his nose and mouth. “We don’t have all the facts yet. Thankfully they got ahead of that meat supplier, but cases are still being called in across the country. I don’t want to scare you, but this is shaping up to be pretty serious. It’s good that you’re going to get home early.”

“What about Louise? And the other patients like her?” Shiro had asked, concerned. “Is she okay? I know you can’t give me specifics, but…”

The resident had patted Shiro’s shoulder twice, quick and consolatory. “We’ve called her sister. She’ll take it from there,” was all he’d said, and with the surgical mask in the way, Shiro couldn’t read his face, could only see that pinch at the corner of the resident’s eyes, unfathomable. The white and yellow daisy pattern on his orchid purple scrubs had seemed to mock Shiro with its impersonal cheerfulness. Nonetheless, the resident’s opinion had swayed him. The unit had been dismayed but understanding about his decision to leave earlier, and had asked for the evening to finish their mods and seal up the hardware of the myoelectric arm. Keith had been thrilled to add extra days to their trip, gleefully talking about the route changes he was planning. Hearing the undercurrent of relief in Keith’s voice, Shiro had felt like he’d made the right choice, and had been ready to say his goodbyes.

The afternoon he’d spoken to the resident, Shiro had been waiting for the imaging lab to call him in, waiting with Louise like he used to. And that morning, he’d been waiting with her for the lab once more, one last time.

“Shiro, **_go!_** ” the doctor had yelled again, shoving a patient away with her foot, grabbing an IV pole and swinging it around her for clearance, freeing a shaken nurse who’d huddled to the doctor’s side. “We’ll be right behind you! Get out of here!”

Shiro had looked to the body of the resident as if he could advise him again, had stared at that frozen expression. That time, the terrified face had told him everything he needed to know. Shiro had ducked away from a grasping arm, turned, pushed two of the patients into each other, thrown the third to the floor, and run. He’d run as fast he could to the back door, where midday light spilled in through the small, wired window, painting a brightly lit square on the floor tiles. Rapid footsteps had chased him, but he hadn’t dared to look back, had just pumped his legs faster, breath sucking in and out of his lungs, in and out, in and out, throat open, unburdened. He’d burst through the back door like a cork from a bottle, had turned to try and push the door shut, but it had been a weighted hold-open, and the springs had pressed back as he’d gritted his teeth, had pushed harder, and watched the patients run ever closer, reaching, yearning. Their faces were slack and vacant, they did not snarl or grimace as they ran, they did not growl, groan, or call. As they’d drawn closer, they had opened their mouths wide and clacked their jaws together, as if they could already sense his flesh beneath their teeth. When the door had finally, mercifully, fallen closed, he’d heard the click of the lock engaging, and the door rattled as the patients piled up against it, shaking and jolting in its frame as Shiro backed away hurriedly, unsure if the door would hold. His heart had thundered away in his ears as he’d thought about the click of the lock, what it might mean for the doctors and nurses still inside. Sealed off the ward, the doctor had said, but what about the rest of the center? As if in answer, the door rattled again, shook with the series of impacts landed against its metal surface.

The sky had been blue, the sun golden. It had still been strange to Shiro to see a place so flat, so uninterrupted by mountain, canyon, or hill, and it had made him feel like he could see all the Earth at once, spread out before his eyes. High in the sky, sunbeams had beaten down on his unprotected neck and face, searing him. A good day, birds making the shape of a V as they’d flown across the sky.

He’d run back to the front of the center, to the reception desk, where doctors and nurses were milling about, talking in agitated, hushed tones, several seated, hunched over, crying into tissues, their scrubs and white coats stained with blood, everyone pale-faced and saddened. People had stiffened whenever the closed set of double doors at the end of the lefthand hallway thudded, sounding with impact. The head tech of the prosthesis unit had spotted him then, and had drifted over morosely, the cracked carapace of Shiro’s arm in his hands. They’d been overtaken by patients attracted by the noise of machinery and had managed to grab the arm on their escape, but the circuits and wiring had already been damaged, the shell cracked and breaking. Shiro had clenched a trembling fist in his shirt, had willed the rapid tide of hurt, anger, and sadness welling up in his throat to subside. A professor from the imaging lab had rubbed his shoulder comfortingly, about the same age as Shiro’s own mother. She’d smiled at him kindly and said, “Go home, Shiro. You’re our patient too, and our priority. Go home and get safe. We’ll settle things with the program, and we’ll be in touch about the progress on your prosthesis, hm? You’ve got our email, and our number.”

And for a second time that day, he’d turned around. He’d emerged into fevered sunlight, heat lashing at his brow, so bright he could barely see, his own limbs moving automatically as he’d walked slowly to his car in the parking lot. All was golden. All was bright. He’d slid into the driver’s seat. The metal tooth of the seat belt burned his palm as he’d buckled it around his waist, but it was comforting somehow. He’d turned the ignition and the news had come on with a snap and buzz of static.

“In breaking news, multiple state health offices have sent warnings to the CDC regarding a potential pandemic building in parts of the Midwest and Appalachia. Initially thought to be a new outbreak of mad cow disease traced back to meatpacking plants, new field research is revealing that contamination may in fact be coming from local agricultural fields, linked to a mysterious fungus that has been plaguing wildlife in several states…”

A hand lands on his shoulder and he turns a third time.

“Did you say something?” Keith asks curiously, in that masked half-shout. Their rubber gloves, Shiro realizes with a lurch, are the same color as that resident’s daisy-patterned scrubs. A weak breeze cools the light sheen of sweat building on Shiro’s neck and underneath the silicone seal of the faceguard, raising the short hairs on his nape and reminding him why they’re both out here in this inexplicable garden. He blinks, once, twice, takes a quick, filtered, gasp of a breath. He must have spoken too quietly for Keith to understand. Briefly, he glances around them again, peers into the drifting fog cover, the wan, indifferent light, the open mouth of the forest studded with thorny branches, everything shadowed in greys, save for the vivid fall foliage.

“No,” he says, louder to make sure he’s heard this time. With the glare of natural light falling across the lens of Keith’s respirator, he can’t see his face, can’t tell what he’s thinking. Keith’s right there, hand on his shoulder, standing by him, but he feels so far away in this place, so close that he’s come out the other side to become alien. He grasps Keith’s wrist, thumb tracing the jut of bone, the rubber of their gloves squeaking awkwardly, adding friction where there was only smoothness before. Keith squeezes his shoulder again, wordless comfort, and quietly, they separate.

In the shed they find plenty of gardening tools, but more importantly, there’s a wheelbarrow, spades, a wood axe, and a neat stack of extra firewood. The wheelbarrow they lift over the mesh barrier, wood stashed in its belly, but the other tools they take with them inside. They scrounge up cleaning supplies from the mudroom – extra bedsheets, buckets, bleach, a mop, and remarkably, a window scraper. It’s an unspoken agreement that they both want to stay, as in their brief exchange that morning, though they haven’t explicitly talked about it. Things that will be thrown away do not need to be maintained, but there they are finding a clear spot away from the house to dig a large, shallow hole, there they are laying a bedsheet in the bottom of the wheelbarrow, there they are, retrieving all the fallen corpses they’d made the day before. They seek out the more intact bodies first, carefully wedging bedsheets under them to create slings, keen on minimizing accidental contagion. Locked in rigor mortis, the corpses are tumbled awkwardly into the wheelbarrow, knocking into each other with dull, fleshy thunks. Already pooling at the bottom is a foul, deep maroon soup, sloshing with every bump and dip of ground the wheels roll over. Only Keith can move the wheelbarrow, so they’re careful with how many bodies they take in each trip back to the hole, using the bedsheet they’d laid down to help flip the whole heap of bodies out into the hole.

Shiro and Keith fall into a rhythm like that, slowly ferrying bodies to and fro, until they’re left with the many discards lying about the grounds. Using the spades like oversized sporks, they scoop up the remnants – the odd body part, organs, torn muscle, sometimes with a flap of skin or a gelatinous flop of tendon still attached. The repetitive, physical nature of the work, and the very fact that Keith and Shiro are, in the end, busy shoveling corpses, has Shiro’s mind wandering.

The word “zombie” is a loaded term. When used to refer to the afflicted, it’s immediately sensational, easily provoking reactions regardless of the emotional context. But it implies a drastic, inaccurate simplification of how the infection spreads and works, and also erases what Shiro thinks is one of the most upsetting things about the epidemic – until an afflicted suffers fatal trauma to the head, they could still be considered alive. Between the time a patient falls into a coma state and wakes already under the control of fungal infection, there is no defining transition from life to death, and even then, the definition of death is relative. How much of the brain is lost, and in what areas? At what level of neurodegeneration does a person, a self-actualized, conscious, individual, cease to exist? Even worse, everything about the infection is internal. Without regular MRI scans, bloodwork, biopsies, and other lab tests acting as a window to the havoc being wreaked upon the body, outwardly, there are few signs that anything about the patient has changed at all. In an older time lacking the advances of modern medicine, Shiro imagines the infection would have been deemed a sleeping sickness, some sort of vengeful, godly curse sent to plague humankind. He’s noticed that the doctors and researchers speaking regularly with the press have been very careful to emphasize that the neurodegeneration of the afflicted sufficiently advances to a state where patients would be expected to experience a sort of ego-death, meticulously outlining the different unconscious states to make it clear that patients are not in a locked-in or persistent vegetative state. The latest public health guidance has also included the general criteria doctors are using to track the stages of the infection, including threshold percentages of tissue loss in various parts of the brain. In the public sphere however, continued confusion about the myriad unconscious states abound, and brain death is a term bandied about like a bludgeon.

To make things more complicated, the prions responsible for accelerated neurodegeneration and altered by successful partnership with _Ophiocordyceps unilateralis_ can also spread on their own. Having initially accumulated in the soil after previous outbreaks, the prions first bound to the plant cells of crops sown in contaminated fields. Upon being eaten by animals infected by a heretofore inert, mutated, temperate form of _O. unilateralis_ , the prion and fungus formed an unholy symbiotic partnership whose workings continue, unfortunately, to baffle scientists. The result is a quick working infection capable of contaminating both produce and meat, affecting a wide range of animals, transferring through bodily fluids, and becoming airborne when fungal fruiting bodies are present. The massive emotional trauma that comes of watching a full, complex, human being become manipulated by fungal cells clustering in or near spongified brain tissue, and the tissue near the heart, spine, and muscles, is just an incidental side effect.

In contrast, patients who only contract the fungal isoform prion do not become afflicted, still suffering massive loss of brain tissue, but with no fungal cells to make up the difference. Under the circumstances of this epidemic, death has become purposeful, intent. An active, concrete decision made by a proxy rather than a natural happenstance. Making medical decisions on a patient’s behalf during any prolonged unconscious state has always been emotionally and ethically fraught, but with the afflicted thrown in the mix, the quandaries have only continued to grow. Hospitals have been caught in the middle, fearful of liability and the ever-present worry that they may be forced to kill an end-stage, afflicted patient. Extremely specific waivers have become a norm in the intake process for suspected fungal infection cases, prompting accusations of rights violations, with several cases already moving through the courts. The institutions that can afford it have created isolated wards dedicated to fungal patients given that the afflicted only target live, uninfected beings. Treatment centers unable to create separated spaces instead present detailed, dedicated emergency plans. There is an ever-increasing need for more ventilators, hospital beds, and full-face respirators currently being filled by international allies, though the rising infection count abroad could soon change that. General ventilation too, is a large problem when keeping the spores in mind.

Everything is just too much and too many. Too many bodies falling still in the middle of the day, too many people lying unconscious in hospital beds. Too many afflicted, ever growing in number, wandering unchecked through the country from that initial, undetected, overwhelming outbreak and every uncounted case of transmission afterwards, crammed together in wards with nowhere to go but the dubious, penned-in camps some states have opened, raising too many ugly specters. Too much food thrown out, leaving grocery store aisles and crates much emptier than normal, raising living expenses, making it difficult to put meals on the table and make ends meet. And always, too many questions. At what point is it permissible to deem a person dead, and burn the body? Who takes the responsibility for potential fallout, should the spores spread through a health institutions’ mechanical systems? If one person kills an afflicted out of self-defense, could that person be prosecuted for murder? What does prevention of the infection look like, and beyond that, prevention of a swarm of afflicted? What methods are deemed acceptable? And growing louder, a heated discussion around the social contract between medical professionals, patients, and the wider public, debating the extent of responsibility owed, weighing personal risk against professional obligation, or if there should be an obligation altogether. Here and there, a clinic overrun, EMTs attacked and killed on a house call, an entire family bitten and fallen in the ICU. Everyday, small and large tragedies both.

It’s a mistake to think that the afflicted are irrational. It’s true that they do not seem to think or be truly conscious, but they are perfectly designed to the infection’s purpose, to spread spores as far and wide as possible. They do not rest, they do not feel pain, they do not eat or drink, they do not stop until it is time for the fruiting bodies to emerge, spindly filaments creeping from every cavity, from split bones, hollow abdomens, rotting lacerations, open ears, and empty eye sockets. Bobbing at the tips, small, incongruously cheerful yellow perithecia, shouting danger. When the wind shifts so do the spores, clouds of white, like snow, like ash, heralded by the musty, unpleasant stink of mildew. Once the fungal cells are entrenched, they leech all the nutrition they can from their hosts before the flesh begins to soften and rot, a bed to nourish the fruiting bodies that will contain their legacy. The afflicted morph into wandering bags of stabbing, knobby bones leaving snail trails of rot and gore, their bodies falling apart, dropping body parts behind them as souvenirs of macabre molting. If the infection is far enough along, a downed afflicted may fruit anyway, the cheerful, bobbing yellow lollipops of fruiting bodies marking the place where they fell, where there is no grave to contain them.

The afflicted don’t bite to eat, they bite to multiply. When they swarm, there is pressure, the sensation of bodies pushing in at all sides, as if Shiro were on the passively murderous version of the JR line during Tokyo rush hour. They scrabble, they grab and reach and search for warmth, they heave and lunge, like they miss the consciousness they used to have, like they’re looking desperately for the remnants of who they used to be – but that’s all just projection. What they really want, is to sink their teeth in, and hold. Grip with flat, omnivorous human teeth, meant to grind and tear, but barely worth a mention compared to the sharp, threatening fangs of other animal predators. The intent is to find another host, to spread and survive, so the prey must remain alive to walk elsewhere, to wander, far and wide. The afflicted shamble, but when they hear the noise of breathing, the smell of blood, they turn their unseeing, rotting, weatherbeaten faces, their eyes empty holes, and they run, they stumble into a jog, they sprint, as if they were the ones being chased. But up close, their faces are strangely peaceful, blank as they clack their teeth together, work their jaws. They are quiet, do not growl or snarl or make any noise, absent of any of the aggressive behaviors that a malicious human of intent might show. When they overcome a human, they bite, almost politely, daintily, sinking teeth in deeply to a soundtrack of screaming, crying, sobbing, before moving to another area of open skin and biting again. From Shiro’s experience, he finds that they usually bite three to five times before moving on, but in a swarm, the bites could be from any number of afflicted, their victims covered in marks at the end, left to imagine how much longer they have before true oblivion has them closing their eyes in exhaustion and falling to the ground, never to wake again. Leaving them, like the afflicted leave them, to see, wide-eyed and awake, what they will become, leaving them to decide what they will do.

It’s not uncommon for some attacked to die of blood loss, from the number of bites to soft, tender places, because it’s not like the afflicted can aim, and they can be rough, tugging and tearing and clamping down, like they had been to the resident from South Dakota. It’s not uncommon for the victims to feel bereft, confused, because they are still alive to stare in the yawning throat of the future, the beckoning void of unconsciousness. The afflicted do not eat. They do not hunt humans for food, or as prey. They do it just to bite, just to leave a bit of the cells inside them, behind. And that is, in its own way, incomprehensible, feels cruel in the way that people who hurt other people to just make them hurt, feels cruel. Sometimes the afflicted is someone their victim knows, a beloved family member, a lover, a mentor. And so, it is also not uncommon for the pop of a gunshot to go off in the middle of the night, for there to be cold-eyed survivors, mouths steeled in a line, haunted by the ghosts they were asked to make, the mercy they were requested, begged, to deliver.

In these circumstances, death is a decision. Purposeful, intent. Shiro thinks all the time about Allura, about the essay she wrote once in a Film Studies class, about zombies. _The creation of the modern zombie is irretrievably linked to the horrors of 17 th and 18th century transatlantic slavery, and the legacy it left on Haitian shores_, she’d written, in one of the papers that would guide her future path to London SOAS. _On French sugar plantations where slaves would be beaten, brutalized, and worked to death, suicide was a reclaiming of a slave’s own life, a final defiance to the master who claimed to have complete ownership over them. In this way, suicide was seen as a slave’s ultimate act of theft, stealing their own life away and taking their body under their own control, far from the hands of their overseers and masters. And it was believed that death would return the slave to lan guinée, Guinea or West Africa, a symbolic homecoming escorted by Baron Samedi, the voodoo god of the cemetery. To counter this, the overseers, who themselves might be fellow Haitians or voodoo priests, would speak of the zombie. Baron Samedi would bar the grave to those who had taken their own lives, preventing them from returning to lan guinée and leaving their bodies to wander the earth, to fall under the control of human hands and work eternally in the fields, unthinking and unquestioning. Zombification was a slave’s greatest fear – to die and still not belong to oneself, their body forever to be directed at their master’s whim, trapped and controlled. Parallel folklore tales spoke of bokor, sorcerers or witches for hire, who could separate the soul from the body, to create zombies of two kinds: a zombie of the body, the corpse, which could then be manipulated to work under the bokor’s bidding, and a zombie astral, a soul or spirit captured in a fetish to enhance the bokor’s own power. This understanding of zombification mirrors many of the beliefs present in African religions, where souls of living or dead persons are stolen and captured to become the servants of the witch who took them. The body then, is reduced to an automaton, a unit of labor, sold off and shipped overseas to work in factories, or to be freely manipulated at the sorcerer’s say so. Zombification therefore, represents a certain colonized, capitalist angst, thingified humanity that only has value as a production unit. Within the context of the Haitian Revolution, zombies also came to symbolize a type of resistance, the strength of herbal and plant produced poisons and concoctions adeptly deployed and wielded by houngans against European masters who could not understand or comprehend them, and a way to mythologize and make sense of the fear that rebelling slaves invoked in battle, through their unrelenting fervor and courage. The zombie then becomes a figure invigorated by sorcery and supernatural power, an immortal figure to embody the ferocity and strength of will of rebel slaves, the living dead beyond death, a figure to stand for brutal, righteous glory over the oppressors._

 _Modern depictions of the zombie, however,_ Allura had noted dryly, _have become completely unmoored from these roots, and frequently explore only the fascistic, Marxist aspects of the zombie’s history._

Automation. Unseeing puppetry, the act of being displaced, moved, from one’s roots and one’s home, the same way the idea of the zombie has been displaced, removed from its original context. This epidemic is a far horror from that of slavery, but the afflicted seem closer, in many ways, to the zombies that Allura had spoken of in her paper, rather than the movie zombies that snarl hungrily or fall in love, misunderstood. In many ways, Shiro thinks of the afflicted as sleepwalkers. Wanderers. Continually roaming the earth until they’re forced to fall, chasing after something they are not conscious enough to know. A means to an end.

Shiro understands chasing and being chased. He’s good friends with the threat of sudden, inexplicable death, the constant sword dangling over one’s head. He knows the sudden terror of the body, the epiphany of it being separate from you, foreign from you, cleaved from the mind, the thing that houses you, traps you, all at once. The flesh that you inhabit, that you cannot escape. And he’s used to running. Ever since he was a child receiving his diagnosis, he’s been racing for time. Even after the arm amputation that had finally seen the slow cessation of his original symptoms, he’s still running, pursuing, chasing. Going at his dreams with a will, grabbing at the idea of success, like the second chance he’s been given will fall right back out of his hand at any time, fall out of his body, and turn his mortal shell to dust.

When Keith had finally met up with him in the backwoods, chasing his weak GPS signal, their first objective had been to reach one of the newly created aid stations that had been set up along the outbreak perimeter. Not the reunion they’d wanted, but the one they’d gotten. Keith had been forced to abandon his car at one of the stopped-up junctions where otherwise sprawling interstates led to an exit, where piles of automobiles remained, their owners having abandoned them to flee as roving swarms of afflicted had visibly pawed at the windows and windshields. Clusters of afflicted had continued to rise from chokepoints like those, scattered in the surrounding woods and wilds, wandering aimlessly to other towns, other cities, other states. Shiro had been prevented from leaving the region by a similar chokepoint, and by then, the airport had been shut down as the government had begun to move towards contagion control. He’d watched in distant terror as the newslines scrolled across the top of his phone, about the perimeter that was being enforced by the National Guard, about how the medical community had finally come out with a statement that vectors had begun to transmit the disease to larger and larger cities, and that the country had an epidemic on their hands that needed to be controlled, and quickly. But in the trunk of his car had been a go bag, the ones that he’d always coordinated with Keith as people living in a state where large fires had been commonplace in the dry seasons, and the duffel that he’d traveled to the health center with. They’d expected to camp on their trip, and Shiro had brought all his supplies with him in case he’d gotten to leave earlier.

He’d called Keith. Had argued with him. Had given him shit for being a person who would and did roll up his sleeves and race to his car to find Shiro and get him to safety. Because he’d been scared. Because he wanted Keith to stay home, stay at his father’s place, isolated and away from the urban density that could spell out a potential, catastrophic outbreak. Because they’d been looking forward to their trip, had planned for it for so long, had made so many arrangements for it, had worked long, thankless hours to get the time for it, and he hadn’t wanted it to become something else, something unhopeful, dull and smoking. But Keith would be Keith, and he would forever know and understand Shiro’s bluster like no one else, and he’d said, _Shut the fuck up, Shiro,_ and Shiro knew that he’d been furious, _I still have to go the city to dump my trash and get groceries and things, I might be isolated but I’m not totally off the grid. If I end up having to camp out in the desert anyway, I’d rather be with you. So tell me where you are now and turn your GPS and I’ll find you. You know I’ll find you._

So Shiro had told him, and Keith had found him. And they’d run from the many swarms of afflicted that had been milling about in the brush and the forest, people who had fallen at home unaware or forgotten, or runners who had fallen asleep in the open, thinking they’d be safe for a night only to never come back. He and Keith had made sure to cover any open wounds, had tried to stay away from any other bands of runners who were trying to make it out like them, going with swift, nimble, and sneaky as their strategy. Armed with their emergency go bags, they’d felt a bit better equipped, a bit more prepared, able to take with them the solar batteries, the portable electronics, that could make things easier for them down the line. Paired too with the constant dread was a wonder directed at the greenery surrounding them, the bubbling of brooks, the soft, damp earth that cushioned and silenced their footsteps, the trees, logs, and shrubbery that extended out in all directions, the silence that followed their path, filled only with natural sounds, birds singing, animals calling, the quiet, magnified rasp of Keith’s voice at his side, so present in that space.

They’d foraged as best they could, ate the food Keith had brought with him, and had swept through abandoned barns, farmhouses, and small towns when they wandered into them, a hit and miss strategy that rewarded them with bare shelves picked clean, occasionally brought a swarm down on their heads, or other times, yielded a bounty of supplies. They had agreed early on not to enter areas that were too populated, wary of the way people seemed to eye them in town streets, noticing how visibly ragged and out of place they were.

Bit by bit, they’d diligently made it to the aid camp where there were nurses, portable showers, and food and drink readily rationed but distributed nonetheless. The armored guards on site had mixed reception, made some nervous and wary and let others feel protected, but for their part, Shiro and Keith had glanced at each other and made sure to camp far, far away from those nightsticks and guns. Sound, after all, was a draw for the afflicted, who relied on it so much in place of their sight. They’d long decided to use the camp as a resting point, to use its resources to rest up, assess their options, and see what to do next. And they had spent an easy three days there, reading news, updating their families, finally able to fully download the maps Matt had been trying to send them, data that was being collected by drones to try and track the movement patterns of the afflicted and project where they’d be heading next. It was not wholly accurate, but having the big picture was good enough. It helped that rumors and news made their way quickly through the camp, and in those three days Shiro and Keith had heard many stories, how hackers had doxxed the client list of a company that created elaborate doomsday bunkers, how people had begun to stockpile food in their homes and tussle in the middle of grocery store aisles, how different places had become hostile to runners, afraid they’d carry the infection with them into cities and homes. The nature of the epidemic had made to it prone to mythologizing, words upon words being churned out about what it meant that _this_ particular epidemic had come, where it had come from, and what it meant that it had come _now_ , this time, this era. And endlessly, people had argued about what should be done about the afflicted. To catch them and dump them into an indoor camp and wait until they fruited, until the remnants of the body could be collected and burned, as the government had done so far. To go in and shoot every one, to set them all on fire, eradicate the monsters threatening others’ lives, who would deserve getting shot if they tried to go for the throat. To find a cure, or at least a surefire method of prevention, as fast and as thoroughly as possible. _Were_ the afflicted still people? _Were_ they really dead? If the afflicted were still people, how should they be treated? Meanwhile, Shiro and Keith hadn’t missed the irony that the runners were fenced in too, surrounded by wire fences and gates as a security measure.

On the fourth day, the camp had been swarmed. Finally too loud and too noticeable, too many people drawing yet more afflicted toward its borders. And this was probably not the first time it had happened to an aid camp, not the first time people had come together in a critical mass too warm and noisy for the afflicted to miss. But it had only seemed to confirm to Shiro and Keith that the only thing they could do was keep running. There was a curious paradox at the core of the epidemic that made it difficult to plan for, to run from. The fungal infection didn’t fair well in cold weather, but it could still infect people through animal vectors, through contaminated food, from a single infected source and bad ventilation. The fungal isoform prion relied on food and soil contamination, but was also what scientists had predicted to be the most challenging part of the epidemic to tackle in the long run, given that prions had never been quite that well understood, and no real treatments or cure had been found for the diseases they induced. At the same time, the afflicted worked on a very specific, time sensitive deadline. Each person who was infected followed the infection cycle rather precisely, and the afflicted were guaranteed to stop, fruit, and die. There was always an end in sight, just not the one people wanted. And Keith and Shiro could wander back to Keith’s home, where all of Shiro’s things had been moved in anticipation of the lease that would expire while they were away on the trip they’d planned, they could wander to their friends’ homes, they could wander over to Kolivan and Antok’s place up in the mountains, but uncertainty hung over all of it. A big if. If anyone would say yes to hosting them, if asking at all would damage a relationship, if they would be overtaken by the afflicted while they were traveling, if the afflicted overwhelmed their host city, and if they would all be forced to flee again, to run again. And if that was case, both of them had preferred to just sprint for it, knowing that being together at least, was a sure thing. They would carve out a place for themselves, like they’d always planned to. They’d go on a version of their damned cross-country trip anyway, before turning back.

Shiro’s been running a marathon like his success and dreams are at the finish line, but here he is, radically off course, with just the pack and clothes on his back and Keith by his side. Here he stands before a pile of rotting bodies, dumped haphazardly atop each other in the shallow hole he and Keith have dug. The soaked, sodden bedsheets are strewn over the grisly heap in pathetic imitation of burial shrouds, used to mop up as much of the unpleasant, bloody liquid at the bottom of the wheelbarrow as possible. Extra wood lines the edges of the hole in neat bundles; there had been more corpses than they’d expected, and the original amount of firewood they’d taken from the shed wouldn’t have been enough.

Ever prepared, Keith withdraws a matchbook from his back pocket. Matchbooks and a swiss army knife passed down from his father, two of things Keith always has on his person. The worn cover is a swirling mass of primary colors, and Shiro recognizes the logo of the local crafts shop Keith frequently visits to supply his hobbies. The loud, scraping scratch of a match head against the abrasive strip is abrupt, echoes in Shiro’s head and catches all along his jagged, raw edges as Keith strikes the match against the strip once more, finally sparking and burning alight. It’s with tense, hunched shoulders that he watches flames begin to lick hungrily at wood, watches Keith light another match, and then one more, each scratch like the scrabble of human nails against doors, windows, fragile barnsides.

Keith grabs his shoulders forcefully with a firm, grounding grip and intent stare, and quickly steers him away, back up the hill towards the house. Intense heat pushes against their skin, the vulnerable napes of their necks, and Shiro can’t help but look back as the fire suddenly plumes upwards and outwards, feeding off the volatile gases of decomposition in a series of bubbling, daisy-chained reactions, until black smoke begins to choke the air. With the respirator on, Shiro can’t smell anything, but Keith still slides his hand down to twine their fingers together and give Shiro’s hand a reassuring squeeze, tugs him along, trying to get him to stop looking, stop being mesmerized by the vivid, lively greediness of the fire, all fall colors of stark red, orange, and yellow against the sleepy, morphing green-oranges and grays surrounding them, still wreathed in unfading mist. They both know that this fire is not enough. It is nothing like the heat and power of a crematorium, nowhere near the thousands of degrees needed to disintegrate a human body or vaporize organs and soft tissue, but it is hopefully just enough to kill the fungal cells and prevent them from fruiting.

By the time they hear the loud basso punch of an explosion, they’ve already diluted the bleach with water from the garden hose, Keith vigorously scrubbing down the wheelbarrow while Shiro works the mop across the porch floorboards. They look up just in time to see the fire flaring high into the sky, fingers of flame convulsing erratically, gleefully grasping for the thunderous, dark cloudheads, acrid black trailing all around. Racing downhill, they’re relieved to find that they’ve chosen a good spot for their pyre, the nearby forest line remaining untouched and whole. There are more bodies fallen to the cratered bottom of the hole, scattered there by the force of the concussive blast, the remains of their limbs splayed out, twisted and contorted. Keith’s shoulders slump, and he sweeps up some of the stray branches around the pyre site and throws them in, watching the smoke rise immediately, spiraling up into the air. They glance at each other again, lips thinned. A loud sound like that could attract more afflicted to them, though the smell of smoke is just as likely to repel them. The smoke won’t mean much to other runners. It’s common to see fire now. People have always had an unhealthy attraction to it, a faith in its ability to nurture and warm, as much as in its ability to cleanse and destroy, and it is frequently deployed with some prejudice against the afflicted as a weapon, or as Keith and Shiro have done, a way to secure safety, or give some meager sense of closure to the restlessness so present in every moment of the epidemic.

“You okay?” Shiro finally asks. The respirator muffles everything, as it should. Filters out the smoke, filters out their voices and expressions, wipes everything clean and blank. Ironic in this moment, since he and Keith had originally purchased them in case a fire really got out of hand.

“I’m okay,” Keith confirms, and tugs gently at Shiro’s pinky. The light is falling across his respirator lens again, but he thinks he can see Keith’s eyes scrunching up in one of those comforting smiles. They head back up the hill to the house, determined to finish clean up.

Frowning, Shiro drags his mop across handsome, sealed birch boards, following the fine, weaving grain with his eyes, feels a bit bad for soaking the wood like this. He would never treat his own house this way, leave it dripping in the open air, prone to warping. Then again, he would never be able to buy a house this nice. He recognizes the signs of investment – the size of the tiles in the kitchen, the minimal width of the grout, the sense of sturdiness beneath his body as he’d sat there. How all the wood had been smooth under his touch, sandpapered down, with no cracks along their edges, solid wood all the way down and not veneer hiding the particleboard underneath. The baseboards bear no scratches or gouges, and the appliances are all relatively recent in model. He recognizes some from his own, lengthy housemaking wishlist, had been briefly jealous when he’d explored the kitchen for the first time.

Outside, pale birch is accompanied by wooden siding painted a gentle, calming green blue with just enough gloss to reflect the barest hint of dull, diffuse light. A color a bit more suited to the ocean, standing in the middle of a forest. He scrubs it all, gets the door too, watches the gore and decay drip down in dark rivulets. A small sense of satisfaction comes with every drag trail, scrap of skin, and lump of flesh he wipes away, revealing light wood and the shade of clear ocean waters. But it rubs in the budding frustration simmering underneath his skin, too. A house like this would never be his. A house like this is exactly the kind of thing he’d been running for, racing for. To have a tangible sign of rootedness and ownership under his hands, to have the security of a place to hide in, nest in, be himself in, to have a sign that he made it out, he finished the race. To fulfill the unspoken promise he’d made in university, when he and Keith were still roommates but learning to be something more, something bigger than that, when they’d made jokes in front of the TV while their eyes were serious. To be able to stop having to drive three hours every time he wanted to see Keith. To stop feeling so alone. It isn’t that he and Keith don’t have friends, or that they can’t connect with other people, it’s that they connect with each other best. There is no maneuvering he needs to make to maintain what he has with Keith, there is so much less fear between them, and so they are present for each other in a way Shiro finds completely irreplaceable.

Shiro stares at the large, front facing window, scraper in hand, as Keith takes over mopping the other half of the porch. With each swipe, he reveals his own reflection, rendered inscrutable by the respirator, backed in cloudy, tempestuous skies and the column of black smoke rising into the heavens. This is not his house. This is not his land. He knows he and Keith are squatting, he knows the bodies they’re burning right now in the pyre at the bottom of the hill are people that they killed, murdered, and that in the future, their families could come after them for that. And maybe this house was someone else’s finish line, or their vacation home, a retreat in a potentially turbulent life, abandoned in fear. Both he and Keith have seen the tire tracks pressed into the gravel-strewn dirt path leading to the house, carved through tall grasses and falling leaves. But Shiro’s good friends with the pressure of death and he’s decided, like he’s decided every other time, that he wants to live. He’s decided that he values his own life, and Keith’s life, over the life of the afflicted and whoever they may have been. He and Keith are his priority. And there’s a part of him that feels guilty for taking things that he didn’t earn, for doing things he would hate having done to him, but there’s another part of him that really doesn’t feel bad about doing the things he thinks are necessary. He won’t say sorry for wanting him and Keith to live. He won’t say sorry for wanting to survive. He won’t apologize for lodging the pick end of his axe into the brain of an afflicted when he knows getting bitten is a death sentence. He has just as much claim to life as anyone else, and he and Keith are going to weather this.

He thinks a lot about the future. What it will look like, what it _can_ look like. What he needs to do, and what he wants to do. For so long he’s felt that he’s the only one scrambling to catch up, a late university graduate scraping together pennies while everyone else his age is set up with a retirement fund, company equity, and a stock portfolio. With the world around him having descended into a state of turmoil that finally matches the sense of instability that constantly plagues him, he actually feels more grounded, more balanced, as if he’s come into his element. What was once a difference between him and everyone else is now a common experience.

The fire is still burning away when they finally finish up with the porch, everything as dry as they can get it. Unsure what to do with the contaminated cleaning supplies and their makeshift protective gear, they add what they can to the fire, picking through the bleach bucket for the largest chunks of organic matter so they don’t clog the pipes on accident. Not like they could just call a plumber for help. They keep the gloves on, and the remaining bleach gets dumped down the drain of the mudroom sink, which they agree to use as a dedicated disposal drain.

“We didn’t manage to stay all that quiet in the end,” Keith says, respirator dangling around his neck as he rinses the sink and the bucket out, grimacing at the small pieces of skin and gristle that flow down the drain. “Especially with that explosion.”

“Someone must have had a pacemaker or something,” Shiro muses, eyeing the garden and the forest beyond, leaning against the open doorframe. “I haven’t seen any afflicted yet. Maybe the smell of smoke is keeping them away.”

“Maybe,” Keith says, nodding and setting the bucket aside with a clatter. Sighing, he wanders over to Shiro’s side, making a grabby gesture toward Shiro’s hand. He peels the rubber glove off, then removes his own pair with a series of loud snapping and stretching noises, throwing them forcefully into the bucket with a wet slap. Using an elbow, he pumps a large dollop of hand sanitizer into his hand from the jumbo size bottle perched atop the workbench. Sufficiently scrubbed down, he squeezes another handful into Shiro’s palm. “But it probably means we should stay in this afternoon, just in case anything tries to come our way.”

“We can monitor the fire from the master bedroom upstairs,” Shiro offers, rubbing fingers against his own palm, using his thumb to get the gaps between the fingers and over the knuckles. Keith reaches over to help him get the back of his hand. “Thanks. If all goes well and the coast stays clear, you can probably take that hot shower you wanted. I think the master bedroom has a bath, even.”

Keith’s mouth crooks up in the corners as he makes to respond, but his stomach interrupts him with a belligerent growl. Shiro laughs, turning in towards that sheepish grin, finally closing the door behind him with a firm turn of the latch.

“Late lunch first, then,” he says with a snicker. “Let’s go see what’s in that pantry.”

“Shut up,” Keith grumbles with a pout, socking Shiro in the shoulder. They jostle down the hallway, shoving and bumping into each other, but Keith hip checks Shiro into the wall with a sanctimonious grunt of satisfaction, and gets his hands on the pantry door first.

“You play dirty,” Shiro says, prodding Keith in the side as he peers around him at the shelves.

“ _We_ play smart,” Keith replies, sounding breathless and surprised. He withdrawins a jar of preserved apple slices to wave in Shiro’s face. The pale crescents barely move, tightly packed in a brown-speckled marinade. “Look at all this, Takashi. The cereal’s still good, there’s cans of chili and soup, a bunch of pickles and plenty more where this came from – we seriously lucked out. Whoa, look, there’s even some mac and cheese and other pasta left. And snacks!”

Shiro plucks the box of instant mac and cheese off the shelf and shakes it lightly, just to hear the dehydrated shells rattle around. He stares at the saturated purples and oranges printed on the packaging, before looking back into the pantry, slightly disbelieving, where the glint of at least a dozen quart size mason jars wink back at him, crowded next to mobs of cans, several cardboard boxes of plain shredded wheat, and half-full bulk tubs of granola bars. It’s a feast in comparison to the few resources they’ve been able to weasel out of abandoned supermarkets and bodegas, most of them already ransacked by runners just as desperate as they are. Dazed, he turns wordlessly and crosses the kitchen, yanking open the top freezer door.

“Waffles,” he blurts out.

“What?!” Keith seems to teleport across the room with how quickly he rushes to Shiro’s side.

“There are waffles,” Shiro repeats, grabbing one of the sunshine yellow boxes and examining the lettering on the front with wide eyes, like the package will fade as soon as he can actually digest the words. “…They’re cinnamon brown sugar.”

“Oh my god.” Keith practically snatches the package out of his hand. “ _Oh my god._ Takashi. There are waffles.”

“ _Cinnamon brown sugar_ waffles,” Shiro emphasizes, finding the descriptor to be extremely important in the moment. “And we have preserved apples.”

A stunned gaze turns his way, the sort of pleasantly shocked look he hasn’t seen since he first brought up the idea of their trip months and months ago. Eyes sparkling and lips pressed together in an attempt to contain his excitement, Keith’s voice is thick with meaning when he says, “Takashi, we can eat breakfast. A proper breakfast.”

Plates and utensils that they can use, and more amazingly, that _they can wash_ , because they have access to _multiple_ sinks and functioning indoor plumbing. Sachets of instant coffee that they immediately squirrel away in their packs for emergencies. Cooking oil and a rack brimming with spices and dried herbs, and they could make full meals if they wanted, take in a harvest from the garden and replant the nutrients in their bellies. They can take a shower or a bath if they want, maybe even with hot water, and wear definitively clean clothing afterward, purloined from the messy drawers and closets. Sleep on a mattress, under a duvet, for one more night, maybe two, or maybe more. This house could be an opportunity, though Shiro doesn’t think he understood how much of one it was, until now.

They stare at each other, winded and wild in the kitchen, hair in disarray, and crash bodily into each other, crushing chest to chest, as close as they can get, arms twining about shoulders and waists like vines. They stumble on the tiles in a tipsy circle, laughing, guffawing, on the thin edge of hysteria, fingers dug into each other’s backs like claws. Outside the pyre still burns, but in the house they’re relearning the comfort in safety, in a moment’s rest.

Also in Allura’s paper: _The only way to retrieve the will and the soul of the zombie was to feed them salt, shattering their trance and allowing them to come to terms with their own death. Meals served to the zombie were therefore bland and tasteless._

Sitting on the kitchen floor eating freshly toasted waffles topped with preserved apples and sharing a bag of jerky with Keith, Shiro feels that he can begin to understand that too. Salt and sugar, both luxuries, both preservatives, both mundane sources of pleasure on the tongue, basic representative building blocks of flavor. Salt, for cleansing and purification, for the taste of one’s own tears, for the recognition of one’s own sorrow, and therefore, the recognition all the other messy feelings bound up in that sadness – relief, joy, conviction, and other emotions besides. Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and allspice weigh on his tongue, the jerky tasting of similar things, sugar and salt all. Once upon a time these flavorings were priceless too, valuable, hard to process, produce, or procure. They made up a merchant’s income, created a global network of exploitative suffering, and helped supply half an empire’s revenues, all paths that took people, for good or for ill, across worlds, to a new place.

After fortifying their packs with select to-go foods from the pantry, they roost upstairs. The oily coil of black smoke is still steady outside, grown fat on the way the blaze has steadily eaten its way through every inch of morbid kindling. This far away, Shiro can no longer feel the heat or see the details of what is being burned, but he still feels heavy seeing the carefree way the flames dance in the air, flighty and dangerously playful. But the forest is safe yet, still and unmoving, so he settles himself in the comfortable, reclining armchair opposite the window. Keith’s flopped onto the large bed already, frowning at his phone, finally fully charged.

Shiro manages to dig his work PADD out of his pack. He knows Keith has his personal PADD with him too, and he’s been grateful every day they’ve been running that he and Keith have had these go-bags together, have had the scant resources that let them communicate and maneuver on the fly. Things could have been much, much worse. He taps at his own phone to activate the uplink, popping open his email to prep the package to Matt. Scattered GPS data tracking his and Keith’s path, photos, video, material that Matt and Pidge will sift through and share on their tracking project channels to help others prepare and brace themselves. There’s the shattered drugstore they checked earlier that week, close-ups on the shelves to show what items have been taken. A zoomed-in photo of one of the fallen afflicted studded with fruiting bodies, followed by a video of the spores releasing, the way the cloud of white disperses with the direction and force of the wind. Distinctive drag trails or remnants that Shiro thought were worthy of notice, the small disturbances that have helped direct him and Keith out of the way of afflicted swarms over the weeks. Sometimes Matt will ask him to keep an eye out for specific things, a valuable outside point of view, but as the weeks pass, Shiro’s had less and less material to send him for each exchange. The epidemic is no longer fresh, and the major developments taking place now are frequently happening in forensic and research labs, in government and nonprofit conference rooms, while Shiro and Keith are willingly in the same place they were just months ago. It feels good to run, to feel his body moving, keeping his mind on task. A different way of getting away that he could revel in, if things weren’t what they were.

Keith lets out a stream of breath, too controlled to be a sigh, dropping his phone to the bedspread and cradling his head in his hands. “Kolivan and Antok are running,” he says, voice slightly muffled, as if he had the respirator sealing off his face again. Shiro goes to his side, jumps onto the mattress on purpose to make Keith’s body bounce, to get him to look over with a frown. Seizing the chance, he takes Keith’s hand with his own, shimmying over on his belly and propping himself up on an elbow so they can knock shoulders together. Kolivan and Antok have been thinking of running for some time. Keith’s uncles live a little closer to Shiro than they do Keith, but they’re right in the path of two converging swarms, one sweeping up from the aid camps that had been set up near the southern borders of the states, and another coming from the unrelenting early outbreak that has overtaken a large portion of the country’s center. Keith’s been messaging them in his spare time, coordinating with them and his mother, stuck overseas at her visiting professorship. They have a direct CC to the packages that get sent to Matt, and they have all the links and resources that Keith and Shiro do. Shiro thinks they’ll be fine with the same type of viciousness that makes him think he and Keith will be fine, but there’s a new element at play that gives him brief pause.

“…do you want to give them our location pin?” he asks, fingers lingering over the shifting tendons on the back of Keith’s hand.

“Will we have a location?” Keith says back aggressively, as is his way, fingers lacing between Shiro’s and squeezing tight about the meat of his palm, vicelike. His stare is its own kind of compression, a compelling force that bids Shiro to reply, because there’s no promise Keith couldn’t milk out of him, really.

“We can. You want to set up camp here? For how long?” Shiro says bluntly, cracking the subject open between them like an egg.

Keith’s lips press together tightly, blanching, as the corners of his eyes betray the tension thrumming through his body. “I want to stay,” he says, strained, mouth clamping shut around the rest of his words like a bear trap, with piercing teeth.

Shiro hums, makes a show of turning over their intertwined hands to study Keith’s knuckles, skin dry, pulled taut and white against bulging knobs of bone. “We can double check the surrounding forest,” he offers, “Make sure there aren’t any more afflicted hiding there. Then travel to the nearest town, like we originally planned, maybe take the bikes downstairs. Explore, see how things are there. What supplies are left. We don’t have to decide now.”

It’s a silly, sentimental image in Shiro’s head, the two of them on an autumn bike ride tumbling through riotously colored fall forests, yellow-orange leaves catching in their hair and crunching in the folds of their clothes, the faint light of another foggy, overcast day nestling softly against the fibers of thick flannel as they roll through empty backroads and parking lots to the smashed-open doors of looted bigbox stores. But the silly and sentimental are exactly what wire together Keith’s gritted jaw and put the combative glint in his eye, like he’s angry Shiro’s having him give up that much about what he wants, irritated that Shiro dares to make him hope.

Unable to reach out and still hold on to Keith’s worn hand, he sprawls on his belly a little further, a little lower and closer, rolling the joint of his shoulder and resting his head against Keith’s bicep. “I didn’t forget what I said in university,” he says quietly. In this house of opportunity, his voice seems to shimmer and reverberate in the silence. The words come easily when the warmth of Keith’s fingers nestle between his, when he can’t see Keith’s face and doesn’t see the fragile line of his mouth break. “I didn’t forget what I said about living with you.”

The two years he had lived side-by-side with Keith in a shoebox apartment fifteen minutes from the main university buildings, twelve minutes from the local supermarket, and three minutes from a local 24/7 coffee shop, were some of the most memorable of his adult life. Not because of the thrill of graduation, though that was momentous in and of itself, not because of the constant shenanigans that their friend group got up to with no lack of active minds or idle hands, not because of the sensation of his life slowly tilting into equilibrium, but because of comfort and security, simple and plain. Coexisting with Keith had been one of the easiest things he had ever done. Not effortless, because all relationships take effort and Keith is a complicated person, but unburdened, a relationship Shiro had wanted to develop and invest in wholeheartedly. Earning Keith’s trust and faith had never felt like a chore, because it was and is a privilege to get to know him, to feel that little bit closer by understanding how he sees the world. He’d lucked out, in that Keith felt the same way about him. And so that apartment had become a safe place, a haven, where he only needed to exist to be acknowledged, where he only needed to be Takashi Shirogane and nothing else. If he wanted to speak about how he felt, complain, ask for advice, or find someone to get midnight snacks with, it would all be met with Keith’s attentive stare and what Shiro thought of as his listening pose, his head tilted curiously, hip leaning against the closest surface, weight shifted on one leg.

The week of their commencement, they’d made a blanket fort in the middle of the apartment where the living room used to be, boxes piled up all around them, packed and ready to go. By then they’d been used to habitual affection and contact, the brush of friendly fingers, warm hugs for comfort or for greeting, holding hands and lounging together on the sofa in a puppy pile. And buried in a miniature mountain of pillows, sleepy from several bottles of beer, knowing that by the end of the week almost everyone would be scattered across the country and everything would be different, Shiro had gripped Keith’s hand and said in a near snarl, “Keith, I’m not going to give this up.”

Keith had looked over with tired eyes still rimmed red from when the both of them had finally stopped crying just ten minutes ago, ostensibly because they’d started rewatching _Up_ , but really because they’d only started the movie to stop themselves from thinking on everything they’d be leaving behind in seventy-two or so hours. “What do you mean.”

Shiro had shaken their clasped hands impatiently. “I mean this. We’ll live together again one day, as long as you still want it. I’ll get us a house and we’ll have this.”

Keith had stared at him, soul searching, the colors and lights from the screen flashing against the side of his face, tinting his skin, continually changing the shadows that fell across it. His hand had tightened around Shiro’s, and his lashes had dipped as he looked down at their meeting palms. Mouth slack, his lips had moved wordlessly once, twice, before his throat had bobbed in a swallow. “Okay. Okay, Shiro. I want it.”

Eventually, they’d fallen asleep like that, hand in hand, worn ragged by their bittersweet feelings. Waking up, illuminated by piercing, early morning light, that promise had been chased into the same evening shadows where the rest of that night had sunk in, not something they were ashamed of, but something loaded, charged, and meaningful, and therefore hard to look at straight on. And in the years that followed, that promise had continued to drift unspoken between them. They alluded to it constantly, testing each other by prodding at the other’s convictions, separated by time, distance, and everyday responsibilities. Still close, with the use of text and voice and visitation, but not as close as they used to be. And that was what the trip had been planned for. It had been meant to be a proper reunion, to test the waters. Three years after graduation, spent working, gathering funds, visiting Keith, three years wondering if Keith really remembered what he’d said then, delirious but deathly serious all the same, three years and Shiro still wanted that house and that coexistence with unfaded fervor. If the trip went well, he’d thought, he’d start looking at properties with intention, and bring the subject up again with Keith, properly this time. He’d start his race toward the finish line.

In some ways, where they are now is not so far off the mark. They slot together as easily as they ever did, struggle to discuss some of the more serious things like what to do if one of them gets bitten because both of them are too used to being independent and don’t like to listen to other people anyway, but circumstances aside, that’s always been something they’ve had to work on between the two of them. There are new aspects to Keith, but they are happy, intriguing surprises, new areas of polish on a beloved, well-known figure. And he’s grateful for Keith’s presence, that they can lie on this stranger’s bed together again, hand in hand. In this house, not a house he bought, but a house that, nonetheless, slowly seems to be becoming theirs. Whether they bed down on a mattress as squatters, on leaf litter, on grass in the open air, or on hay in abandoned sheds and barns, they coexist, again. To reach Keith, Shiro only needs to extend his arm to feel his skin, brush against his hair, or hold his hand.

Keith loosens his grip, but only so he can wind arms around Shiro’s shoulders, clutch him close and lay his head against Shiro’s hair. Here too, his arms are tight, constricting, but Shiro doesn’t mind. It tells him that Keith wants him there, wants to keep him, hold him still, in a place within reach, close by. “I remember what you said,” he breathes, and Shiro can feel his chest rising and falling under his cheek with each breath. “I always remembered what you said. I still want it. I didn’t expect this, exactly. But…I still want it.”

“You can have it,” Shiro says, wraps his arm around Keith’s waist and tries to match his force, how he impresses his presence on Shiro’s skin. “You know that, right? Whenever you want. You can have it.”

Keith’s fingers stroke upward, over every knob of spine, over his bare nape, into his hair against the grain, his touch firm and reassuring, feeling out those vulnerable spots and cradling them. Instead of responding, he only presses his lips to the crown of Shiro’s head, not like a kiss or benediction but a seal of containment for whatever he keeps bottled and distilled within himself, for whatever words he cannot yet identify, coalesce into sound and conviction. All Shiro can do is wind his grasping hand into the fabric of Keith’s shirt. Despite the warm, almost desperate press of Keith around him, he feels lonely.

That hollow feeling lingers, gnaws at Shiro and makes him restless, even as he and Keith stay huddled close. Keith decides to go with his original suggestion of investigating the nearby town and checking to see how many runners and swarms might be around. If it looks like they can last for some time, then they’ll send Kolivan and Antok a location pin. By the time Shiro shifts back to the armchair, the pyre smoke has become a distinct, thin ladder in the sky, dark and evident against backlit, soft gray clouds. He finishes sending Matt the information package, double checking that Kolivan and Antok are CC’d on the batch, but his distracted mind keeps drifting back to that dark line, the way it’s begun to expand into a proper mass, huffing and puffing, nourished on fresh air and body ash, perfectly framed in the window like a piece of modern art, a minimalist encapsulation of all the unresolved matters that are floating back up to the leaden surface of Shiro’s mind, all the dreck of pond scum included.

He leaves Keith to finish his messages and begins to prowl about the bedrooms. The inside of the drawers are a mess, another sign that the previous owners left in a rush, and there are haphazard piles of hastily thrown aside sweaters and shoe boxes in the closet. There are cleaner imprints left in the thick layers of dust coating cabinet tops and end tables to show the negative space of the things that had rested there before, their sudden lack. He doesn’t look at the picture frames that remain, turns them face down onto their resting surfaces so he can’t see the smiling faces of the house’s original owners. The fact that everything still works – internet, electricity, water, gas – indicates to Shiro that one day they’ll be coming back, that this house is somewhere they want to return to, to keep. This house, with his and Keith’s muddy footprints dried deep in the lush carpet from when they’d barged in, locked the door hastily behind them, and scrambled up to the stair landing to watch warily as the afflicted cast eerie shadows on the living room furnishings from the window, scratched and clawed at the front door as if they were asking to be let inside. They’d huddled there the entire night, wide-eyed and stock still, doing their best to stay silent, until the afflicted lost interest from the lack of stimuli, and left. There were plenty remaining on the grounds in the day, enough that if he and Keith wanted to leave they’d have to kill them.

Winter is on its way. The temperatures have been dropping at night, more and more drastically as they move east, and if snow comes in, he’s not sure what he and Keith will do. They don’t have any heavy winter gear with them, though he’s seeing enough left behind here that he and Keith wouldn’t at all be lacking for choice. The smart thing to do would be to ask for Matt’s help in finding the house owners so they can all work out some sort of agreement. He’s still got money in his account, and so long as the internet holds, he and Keith would be perfectly capable of making the transfers needed to pay some sort of rent. They’ve already murdered a path through half the country; it would be better to keep everything else as above board as possible. At least then they’ll have a place to shelter in, at least then they won’t have to worry about finding enough food, at least then they’ll have more time to think and make decisions. The clock is counting down; he’s running out of time. Suspended again in the fallen gap between an end he knows is coming and a new beginning that has no start date.

He gathers two large, thick flannels, a couple thermal shirts. He wishes he could take one of soft, overlarge sweaters, a style that Keith favors, but it won’t do them any favors in the long run. Dirt, mud, rot, and the other stains that come from fighting the afflicted are not kind to the delicate fibers of knitwear. Either way, it will be nice to have something clean to change into, something that smells of cedar and mothballs, a scent one would only acquire from home living.

Eventually, when Keith calls, delighted that the hot water works, he goes. They step into the shower together, like they did sometimes when they were in university and worn down, the act renewed and novel again after weeks of frigid, speedy outdoor scrubdowns. Without the threat of wind chill and hypothermia, they’re able to study each other amidst the steam, hot water raining on their shoulders and turning their skin ruddy with heat. To feel each other move in the stretch of muscles underneath skin, sliding shampoo between fingers through the texture of each other’s hair, the simple luxury of running hands over shoulders, arms, back, taking care of each other, checking to see that there are no new bruises or scrapes where infection can dig in. The ring of falling water against porcelain tile and tub drowns out all other noise, fills Shiro’s mind with complacent static as he revels in that nostalgic touch, transported to the ease of four or five years ago.

In the blink of an eye all is silent, just the quiet sluice of water against the walls of the tub as he and Keith drift there in a full, scalding bath, like they could boil themselves new and clean again. They’ve both filled out since university, and Shiro watches the water ripple around his bent knees, rising bare and chilled out of the water. He can feel the yielding stretch of Keith’s pectoral below his head, shifting with the movement of Keith’s arm as he reaches around to gather a handful of the bathwater and tip it over Shiro’s beached joints.

“Should I go back to work?” Shiro asks, blank and quiet in a way he hasn’t been for a long while.

This had been meant to be their reunion trip. Keith and Shiro, traveling cross-country, every minute by each other’s side like they’d been years ago. Keith and Shiro, to see if they could still make it work, to see if things had changed that much. To see how greedy they were for each other still, day after day, another test. They’d both saved up all their time off for it, pulled extra overtime, bartered with HR, to receive a miraculous two months. In the end, that trip had become _this_ , had been overtaken by running, almost aimless, the desperate impulse to pick a direction and go, until they could find something that felt secure, that could belong to them. But an end to this is guaranteed, locked and loaded. Shiro can’t afford to forget the everyday, the other timeline, the before, can’t forget about his rent or his bills, can’t forget about his job or his family back in Japan. And Keith has his commitments too. The world has not ended, it spins on, and time has not come to a standstill. They still need to think about and envision the future. The paradox of the epidemic is live inside of them.

Keith’s index finger taps erratically against his abdomen beneath the water. “How much time do you have left?” he asks quietly.

“Another business week,” Shiro says, rolling his head to the side, still studying his knees. Keith’s knees bob out of the water too, but not as much, since he’s the big spoon. He wonders how his body temperature compares to the bath, if he matches the warmth of the water, or if he’s leeching heat away from Keith, leaving him cold. “What about you? Were you going to go back to work?”

The arms around Shiro’s chest tighten. “Seems weird to be thinking about work in the middle of all this,” he says, purposefully light, deflecting. Meaning, Keith’s either not thought about it, trying to not to think about it, or he’d been intending to wait and see what Shiro would do. Maybe he had thought about work, but tried not to bring it up, unwilling to call _this_ quits, unwilling to make a decision and still be forced to ask afterward, _what now?_ All the basic components of their lives, when they’re running like this, are difficult to achieve.

“Yeah,” is all Shiro can offer softly. He splashes a little water on Keith’s knee next, feels the rumble of amusement humming in Keith’s chest under his cheek. Hand sinking down aimlessly in the water, he feels for Keith blindly, lands on the muscled dip just below the curve of his hipbone, places some pressure there, before he slides his hand up higher to grip onto Keith’s thigh, a place where he has more to give. He can’t see Keith’s face, and doesn’t try to. “Keith. I’m going to work. I promised you.”

Keith’s hand pulls his away, and he gathers Shiro close. He’s still smaller than Shiro, but in that bath, in that heated water, he feels all encompassing, like a blanket, like a wave of desert heat in the height of summer. Compressing, again, like he could embrace him so tightly, Shiro would condense into a more brilliant, valuable form, impervious and unyielding. His hands grasp, his arms close in, and he cradles Shiro’s body close the way no one else has ever done, and no one else ever will. Fingers trail over his chest in a caress, and Shiro does his best to return the favor, runs his hands over sinew and bone, everything precious underneath. Just a single scratch, just a single bite, and all this could disappear.

“Tomorrow,” Keith whispers in Shiro’s ear, wraps his legs around Shiro’s calves so that he encircles him, holds him altogether. Gently, he rocks, cheek pressed to the swooping hollow between Shiro’s throat and shoulder, the place made for him, where Shiro’s heartbeat hovers right beneath the surface. In the bath, he creates an ocean, waves rolling gently around their bodies, lapping at waist, thighs, calves. Soft, wild black hair sticks to Shiro’s cheek, and Takashi closes his eyes. Keith’s lips tremble against his pulse when he speaks. “Tell me, ask me again, tomorrow.”

**Author's Note:**

> me, in the middle of writing this fic: .....is this....cottagecore....?
> 
> The driver for this fic was actually for me to write a zombie thesis in fic form - I wanted to kind of explore what the modern zombie stands for and why this figure in particular resonates with us now, though honestly idk if i achieved what i wanted in the end!! It was also extremely driven by something my dad always says when we watch zombie stuff together which is something along the lines of "they just need to wait the zombies out a couple months cause they're all just gonna rot and decompose" lmao. This fic also has a [official Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6Roq592whSzjRYqhN4gEZI) whoo!!
> 
> The background of zombies in Allura's essay is true. Check out these [Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/how-america-erased-the-tragic-history-of-the-zombie/412264/) and [NY Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/opinion/a-zombie-is-a-slave-forever.html) articles as starters! If you're interested in learning more, [Amy Wilentz](https://amywilentz.com/) and Sarah J. Lauro's works are a good place to start. Lauro's book "The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death" may be particularly relevant. imo Lauro doesn't thread the needle that well sometimes, and Wilentz may have a more thorough background in Haitian customs and culture. 
> 
> There is no mention of vaccinations because prions are misfolded proteins and O. universalis is a fungus. I'm not actually sure that a vaccine would actually apply since there is no bacteria or virus involved. Yes, O. universalis is the zombie ant fungus and I'm pretty sure the chances of it mutating to human infection are very small. We do however, study it for medicinal purposes. The approach to the epidemic was also borrowed a little from [this talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4DfENVEuFo) Tim Verstynen gave about what zombie brains would look like from a neurosci perspective.
> 
> That bit about salt and sugar - allusions to triangle trade and transatlantic slavery there, but also the salt monopoly and tax in China that made Anhui merchants very very rich.
> 
> The title is a reference to funerary practices in some culture that involved placing gold coins over the eyes of the dead, or a piece of jade on the tongue, to otherwise protect a soul or ensure them safe passage into the afterlife.
> 
> Fall for Sheith prompts used included: fall harvest, bonfire, apple picking, sweaters/flannel, pumpkin spice, and camping. Thanks so much for reading!


End file.
